Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Google Fonts

Fonts and typography have a fascinating world of their own. A lot of thought and effort goes into creating a new font family. In the era of pen and paper, the handwriting gave an insight into the personality of the writer, perhaps the same is conveyed through their choice of fonts in the digital era.

My initial days in IT started with Verdana - the font looked clean, nicely spaced and easy on the eyes. However, it wasn't quite the right choice for technical documents, which was the real of Arial and Times New Roman. These two fonts were --and I guess still are -- so ubiquitous by their presence, they were considered as workhorse fonts.
Another font that caught attention was Helvetica, it's an elegant font, and it looks best in the titles or headers.
Around 2007, Calibri became the default font in MS-Office products and it became the new de facto standard. Although it still remains the default font, Microsoft later came up with Segoe UI, and it has been one of my favourite fonts for the past 4 years.

Recently, I have been experimenting with IBM Plex font family, and loving it. It is functional as well as aesthetic, and provides a much wider range of styles and a better support for Unicode.

If you love typography, and enjoy trying out different fonts, the Google Fonts site offers more than 800 free typefaces.

https://fonts.google.com/

Monday, February 5, 2018

Ike

Ever since being introduced to the Eisenhower Matrix, I have been using it manually in one form or the other; so it was a delight to find a productivity app specifically based on it.
Aptly named as "Ike" -- the nickname by which Eisenhower was fondly referred to -- the app presents us with four quadrants: FOCUS (tasks that are important and urgent), GOALS (tasks that are important but not urgent), FIT-IN (tasks that are urgent but not important), and BACKBURNER (tasks that are neither important nor urgent). The user interface is sleek and intuitive and provides most of the features needed in a To-Do list, such as reminders, schedulers, and notes.
One cool feature is Location reminder: You can specify reminders about tasks to be performed at a specific location. A boon for forgetful folks like me!
The free version is good enough, but I would suggest the full version which costs Rs. 100/-. It's worth it.